10 facts you didn’t know about Anzac Day
Military historian Dr Tom Lewis OAM is the author of 12 books, his most recent being Carrier Attack, a forensic analysis of the first air raid on Darwin.
1. Everybody knows ANZAC is the acronym formed from the initial letters of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, but did you know it came about because it was the formation into which Australian and New Zealand soldiers were grouped in Egypt prior to the landing at Gallipoli in April 1915.
2. First written as A. & N. Z. Army Corps, it soon became A. N. Z. A. C. and the new word was so obvious that the full stops were omitted. The word was initially used to refer to the cove where the Australians and New Zealanders landed and soon after, to the men themselves.
3. An Anzac was originally meant to refer to a man who was at the Landing and who fought at Gallipoli, but eventually it came to mean any Australian or New Zealand soldier of World War I.
4. After the withdrawal from Gallipoli, Anzacs who had served at Gallipoli were given an “A” badge to be attached to the colour patch – the fabric patch on a soldier’s sleeve which was the mark of his battalion. The A badges became much admired by others.
5. Proposals to have something special commemorate the day of the initial landing began well before the first anniversary, with an enthusiastic campaign begun in Queensland.
6. The first Anzac Day commemorations were held on 25 April 1916. The day was marked by a wide variety of ceremonies, services and marches across Australia. In the Sydney event convoys of cars carried soldiers wounded at Gallipoli with their nurses on board.
7. Of course, most of the Australian forces were still overseas, for the war did not end until November 1918. There was a special march through London by around 2, 000 Australian and New Zealand troops, and a London newspaper dubbed them “the knights of Gallipoli”.
8. A dawn service was not originally the routine. It is known a requiem mass was held at daybreak in 1918 in Albany, WA, where the convoys had left from. A dawn ceremony was first held in Sydney in 1928.
9. The Australian War Memorial was built in Canberra after the war, but a ceremony was not held there until 1942, well into WWII.
10. There is no legal guide as to what makes up an Anzac Day ceremony.
Scroll through the gallery above to view historic images of World War I.
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